Customer Stories
Jack Fertility’s customers needed a simpler way to understand sensitive fertility results without searching through static reports, forums, or disconnected websites.
Jack Fertility used Microsoft Copilot Studio to build Ask Jack, grounded in approved clinical and scientific sources.
The startup reduced its initial build timeline from weeks to days and created a foundation for providing private, on-demand fertility guidance.
Male fertility is a significant part of the reproductive health equation, yet many men pursue testing only as a last resort. Traditional testing can require uncomfortable clinic visits, time away from work, and expensive fees.
Jack Fertility, co-founded in Oxford, United Kingdom, by Lily Elsner and Nick Shipley, aims to break down those barriers by making sperm health more proactive, accessible, and understandable. Through a private, on-demand service, customers use a convenient home test and safely send samples to the laboratory through the postal system, enabled by the company’s proprietary preservation solution, Sperm Shield. This digital experience is designed to encourage early intervention and reduce stigma.
To best meet its customers’ needs, Jack Fertility created Ask Jack using Microsoft Copilot Studio, The conversational agent explains fertility concepts to individuals.
As with all things fertility, time is of the essence. For a lean startup, speed matters because every week spent building supporting technology is a week not spent improving the core service or reaching customers. The company wanted an AI approach that its small team could shape directly without standing up a large engineering program.
Co-founder Lily Elsner describes the change in development speed: "With Copilot Studio, we stood the agent up in a matter of days rather than what we initially thought would be weeks and weeks of engineering work." Elsner estimates that building the agent with Microsoft Copilot Studio took 3–4 weeks with a mix of nontechnical and technical advice less than 10 hours per week, compared to the 12–16 weeks and £30–45k that a traditional rule-based chatbot would have required. That’s an 8–12 week acceleration to market and a direct cost saving of up to 50K. “Rather than maintaining hundreds of dialogue trees and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) rules for each product update, Copilot Studio enables Ask Jack to handle infinite question variations natively and scale knowledge updates through simple prompt refinement, reducing ongoing maintenance from 2–3 hours weekly to just 1–2 hours monthly,” she says.
“With Copilot Studio, we stood the agent up in a matter of days rather than what we initially thought would be weeks and weeks of engineering work.”
Lily Elsner, Co-founder, Jack Fertility
Before the agent, a customer's laboratory results were assembled into encrypted PDF reports. Each report took up to two hours to create, introduced opportunities for manual error, and left customers to interpret measurements such as concentration, motility, morphology, and volume. The team added website articles and links to anticipate common questions, but static information could not respond to the concerns of each individual.
Alternative paths to information added cost (several thousands of pounds per year), delay, or uncertainty. Private consultations can cost hundreds of pounds, while public healthcare access may involve extended wait times to even get an initial consultation. Online forums and general web searches offer immediate information, leaving people to determine source credibility on their own while navigating an unfamiliar and emotionally charged subject.
The founders wanted customers to be able to ask questions privately at any hour. They also wanted to ensure appropriate safeguards for a sensitive healthcare topic in a heavily regulated environment.
Jack Fertility evaluated multiple technology approaches, including work through its Google for Startups program. Ultimately, the founders wanted a platform that could move quickly from concept to a controlled, customer-facing experience while enabling the team to define trusted knowledge sources and maintain firm medical boundaries.
Copilot Studio provided Jack Fertility with a low-code path to build and refine the customer experience. The team configured a working agent in days and then spent weeks testing its tone, knowledge boundaries, refusal behavior, and escalation paths, ensuring the agent doesn't diagnose or recommend treatment. Elsner and Shipley remained focused on customer experience and scientific integrity rather than AI infrastructure.
The agent is grounded in a curated body of Jack Fertility content, National Health Service information, World Health Organization material, and peer-reviewed research selected with medical input. Responses include references so users can understand where the information comes from. When approved sources do not support an answer or when a question requires clinical judgment, the agent says so and directs users to an appropriate healthcare professional.
The team ran user sessions in which participants tested the agent with scientific questions, humor, slang, sensitive language, and conversational styles. Some wanted precise explanations, while others preferred the digital equivalent of speaking with a trusted friend. That feedback helped Jack Fertility calibrate its use of plain language, reassurance, and even occasional emojis to enhance the user experience without compromising the authority of the underlying sources.
Healthcare terminology presented a unique design challenge. Broad safety filters can treat legitimate reproductive health vocabulary as inappropriate, while a health education experience must be able to discuss anatomy and sexual health accurately. Copilot Studio provided controls that helped the team tune responses for the healthcare domain while maintaining responsible AI safeguards and escalation boundaries.
Elsner explains why that control mattered: “The ability to refine response behavior helped us create an experience that is approachable without being casual about healthcare.”
“The ability to refine response behavior helped us create an experience that is approachable without being casual about healthcare.”
Lily Elsner, Co-founder, Jack Fertility
During its pilot, Jack Fertility made the agent available through its website. Customers could ask a single question and return later, or engage in longer conversations while exploring a topic. The founders observed highest usage late at night, reinforcing the value of an experience that does not depend on clinic schedules or the availability of a Jack Fertility team member. Ask Jack saves the company several hours a week of having to engage its medical advisors to answer questions, and spared the company from having to hire a full-time staff member just to field inquiries.
Build time cut from weeks to days
For customers, the agent reduces the mental effort of moving among reports, general websites, and online discussion forums. It can explain the same concept in different ways and help users formulate more informed questions for a clinician. This capability is particularly valuable for people who feel embarrassed about discussing fertility or who need time to process a result before deciding what to do next. It can handle unlimited questions but also doesn't store the chat history which users really liked. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Shipley explains that customers report engagement with the agent "feeling like a conversation."
Shipley says customers value the quality assurance Jack Fertility offers with the agent. "The fact that you don’t have to search around the internet or determine whether information comes from trusted, peer-reviewed research or claims posted in a forum is a relief. You have a one-stop shop where you can ask questions and know the information is based on the best available evidence."
The company piloted Ask Jack on its public website. While site refresh is pausing the agent at the moment, the company will be moving the agent both internally towards a secure post-test portal where the agent could use an individual's actual test results rather than hypothetical examples, while maintaining the same educational scope, safety boundaries, and controlled environment. The company is also planning to return the agent to the website both as a customer acquisition tool, and as a trial of what could be expected in the portal.
“The fact that you don’t have to search around the internet or determine whether information comes from trusted, peer-reviewed research or claims posted in a forum is a relief. You have a one-stop shop where you can ask questions and know the information is based on the best available evidence.”
Nick Shipley, Co-founder, Jack Fertility
Jack Fertility plans to continue refining the agent through user feedback and structured evaluation of factual grounding, sensitive-topic tone, refusal behavior, and safe redirection so that the agent complements clinical care rather than replacing it.
The team also sees opportunities to support customers across repeated tests. Because sperm develops over approximately 74 days, multiple test results can provide a more useful picture of change than a single test. The agent could help customers understand trends, prepare for medical conversations, and stay engaged with their reproductive health between testing cycles.
Longer term, the founders envision Jack Fertility as a broader men's reproductive health platform that supports users through early education, proactive testing, fertility planning, and other stages of care. While the company’s earlier, more engineering-intensive approach provided useful lessons, building agents on Microsoft technology gives the startup a more practical foundation for continued growth.
The strategy remains grounded in a simple business goal: making male reproductive health easier to access and understand. By combining home testing with private, source-grounded conversations, Jack Fertility aims to help more people engage earlier, reduce avoidable uncertainty, and make fertility decisions with greater confidence and better information.
Looking for more inspiring agentic AI transformation stories? Explore additional customer successes on the Microsoft Agent Transformation Stories site.
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